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In reply to the discussion: Bernie Sanders Voted for the Most Reprehensible Pro-Gun Legislation in Recent Memory [View all]JonLP24
(29,990 posts)Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to (Arm) Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS (the word Arm was Help but I was simply pointing out what she meant)
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She went on to say that its impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasnt the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.
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JG: Thats the presidents argument, that we wouldnt be in a different place.
HRC: Well, I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground. Two, we would have been helped in standing up a credible political opposition, which would prove to be very difficult, because there was this constant struggle between what was largely an exile group outside of Syria trying to claim to be the political opposition, and the people on the ground, primarily those doing the fighting and dying, who rejected that, and we were never able to bridge that, despite a lot of efforts that Robert and others made.
So I did think that eventually, and I said this at the time, in a conflict like this, the hard men with the guns are going to be the more likely actors in any political transition than those on the outside just talking. And therefore we needed to figure out how we could support them on the ground, better equip them, and we didnt have to go all the way, and I totally understand the cautions that we had to contend with, but well never know. And I dont think we can claim to know.
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JG: Do you think wed be where we are with ISIS right now if the U.S. had done more three years ago to build up a moderate Syrian opposition?
HRC: Well, I dont know the answer to that. I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assadthere were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middlethe failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.
They were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/
The answer to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands is to sell guns yourself to find out whose selling guns into the wrong stops or stop them from doing so. I think she has found the answer to our gun problem.